When vortex tubes are applied to enhance the coefficient of performance of refrigeration system, the smaller one is preferable. However, the existing vortex generator with a nozzle hole diameter of 0.5mm was not suitable due to chocking of the nozzle hole. Therefore, experimental investigation was made to find an appropriate geometry of vortex generator, which could give a comparable effect of energy separation to commercial ones without chocking problem. The tested vortex generators were tangential and spiral types, which had single inducing channel with larger cross-sectional area than that of conventional multi-hole ones. The experimental result showed that the performance of the spiral type was better than that of the tangential one. As a small size of spiral one, the diameter of cold-end orifice is proposed to an half of tube diameter for the application to refrigeration system, while cold mass fraction ratio is 0.5∼0.6 for a desirable operation.